Portfolio / 2026
Selected
Works
01 / 2026 · Family photographs, drawing and collage
Yako, Girl!
Yako, Girl! began as a way to generate more compassion between my mother and me and build a bridge of understanding as I enter my 40th year and she enters her 70th. I turned to her personal archives to learn about the beginning of her life, before I knew her as my mother, and to see more clearly what she lived through.
Learn more about this work
I draw and collage around these photographs, surrounding a younger version of my mother with my own abstract worlds. In making this work, I am trying to tell her that I am sorry she has suffered in her life. Yako: I am sorry for your suffering. I am sorry you are hurting. In making this work, I am trying to generate more compassion for my mother and healing for myself for things she and I have experienced.
02 / 2025 · Photograph and text
To Tame a Witch:
Hexes
To Tame a Witch: Hexes was inspired by Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series and by my own life. It grew from the idea that women’s power is often disciplined, diminished, and buried because it is seen as too much.
Learn more about this work
Alongside the photograph is a litany of acts meant to tame a woman: from love that controls and constant exhaustion to erasure and violence. I think of these acts as hexes intended to kill her magic. The work asks what happens when a woman is made to disappear and then covered with something beautiful, so that the violence becomes easier to look at.
Hexes
Bury her with beautiful flowers. Lovebomb her.
Spit on her. Starve her. Distract her. Rape her.
Harass her. Follow her. Exhaust her. Exhaust her. Exhaust her.
Deny her due process, policy, and praxis. Beat her. Cut her open. Laugh at her.
Steal from her. Empty her. Shush her. Erase her work. Her words. Her sound.
Drug her. Blame her. Lie to her. Lie to her. Lie to her.
Tell her she’s not woman enough. Gaslight her. Leave her no choice. Kill her.
Bury her with beautiful flowers.
03 / 2024 · Performance lecture
The Colonizer’s
Trash
Hamiltonian Artists · Washington, D.C.
October 10, 2024
In October 2024, I brought the Bureau of Colonial Trash to Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, D.C. Conceptualized as a Black woman-led bureau, it collected objects from American homes that represented mental, emotional, and physical colonization.
Through a performance lecture and communal exercise, I invited participants to bring belongings to the bureau and consider the colonial mindsets, ideologies, and habits those objects carried. Together, we examined them through four categories of trash: mental inferiority, capitalism / consumerism, bad beauty, and spiritual erasure.
The trash collected included graduate degrees, cosmetic products, fast fashion clothing, GLP-1 needles, waist trainers, and designer shoes.
Stephanie A. Kimou
I am a visual and conceptual artist
from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire,
working in Washington, D.C.
I ponder upon and create art
to deepen my understanding
of self and others.
I work with archival photos,
found objects, collage,
and drawings on paper.
I use performance
to introduce my conceptual
and visual art.
I propose the question,
over and over:
via this piece of art,
could I unlock memories
or perspectives
that help heal wounds?